Prison of a Thousand Dimensions: GRAVITY, BUBBLE BOY, INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS

"P-P-Please Mr. Kennedy
I don't wanna go (please don't shoot me into outer space)
I sweat when they stuff me in the pressure suits
Bubble helmet, Flash Gordon boots
Nowhere up there in gravity zero (outer...space)
I need to breathe, don't need to be a hero (outer...space) -- "Please Mr. Kennedy" (Inside Llewyn Davis) 

"Without going out of my door,
I can know the ways of heaven.
Without looking out of my window
I can know all things on Earth.
The farther one travels
the less one knows" -- "The Inner Light" (George Harrison - via Lao Tzu)

"Never get out of the boat.
Absolutely goddamn right." - Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen) - Apocalypse Now 

Vinny Barbarino in the original

We used to call Syracuse the city with the concrete sky; you'd leave your parent's house in NJ to drive back up on a bright sunny day and then, cruising up highway 81, lovely trees on all side, clear blue sky, but then a mass of twisting dark clouds begins to loom off in the distance. The rest of the sky was clear as a bell, but Syracuse loomed ahead like a black shroud; snow never melted therein, merely accrued over the years like sedimentary layers of various shades of frozen salt slush gray; any joy we could muster was a pale blue fire that we continually banked with all the drugs and booze we could afford or handle, surrounded by plastic sheeting on the windows for insulation and still it was too cold. We needed even more layers --wrapped in the protective bubble of mass quantities of bourbon, and blankets, the warmth flickered, maintained via an elaborate magic bullet Jenga --before that I had written often of the depressive yellow film that surrounded me like a plastic bubble, a feeling of isolation all the more painful in a crowd but a thousand times worse alone. Poems and poems I'd written about that yellow film.

Those poems are long gone. My mom threw them out, of course. But their exact existential ennui of is all over Gravity and Inside Llewyn Davis (both 2013), which in turn resemble the 2001 comedy, Bubble Boy (2001). The three might just as well be sequels, and the same overall message reigns: we're all of us trapped in the 3-D space-and-time-suit that is the human body, the egoic gridlock that is the mind, and the whims of an Old Testament warden that is the soul, all three relentlessly dragged back into our orbit of desk, car, couch, and bed no matter how high we fly outside the box; it is the penitentiary of our unrealistic hopes preventing us from reaching through the brass bars of expectations towards the gold ring. After all, we know that ring is an illusion.

Better we learn to love illusion directly.

"You know that story of the Russian cosmonaut? So, the cosmonaut, He's the first man ever to go into space. Right? The Russians beat the Americans. So he goes up in this big spaceship, but the only habitable part of it's very small. So the cosmonaut's in there, and he's got this portal window, and he's looking out of it, and he sees the curvature of the Earth for the first time. I mean, the first man to ever look at the planet he's from. And he's lost in that moment. And all of a sudden this strange ticking... Begins coming out of the dashboard. Rips out the control panel, right? Takes out his tools. Trying to find the sound, trying to stop the sound. But he can't find it. He can't stop it. It keeps going. Few hours into this, begins to feel like torture. A few days go by with this sound, and he knows that this small sound... will break him. He'll lose his mind. What's he gonna do? He's up in space, alone, in a space closet. He's got 25 days left to go... with this sound. So the cosmonaut decides... the only way to save his sanity... is to fall in love with this sound. So he closes his eyes... and he goes into his imagination, and then he opens them. He doesn't hear ticking anymore. He hears music. And he spends the sailing through space in total bliss... and peace." -- Rhoda (Britt Marling) - Another Earth

The ticking, man, Brit Marling, you must hear that all the time, by which I mean the clamor of your geekboy devotees: those of us in love with your heavenly hair but confused by your weird mix of self-serious grad school high conceptual sci fi and skeeved by the wussy hipsters you stock your films with. So much potential so unsatisfying, so ultimately anemic. Those shaggy dork boys need some sunshine, Britt! They're pale. They make the hipster boys in Ti West movies seem robust. They'd break like glass goblins with the gentlest of knuckle taps. I'd fight them for you, Britt Marling. You remind me of a girl I used to know in college. She's older now though.

Save us all from the beauty-remover that is age, Britt Marling!

But if you bear her ticking quote about old Yuri up in space in mind with the upper deck Llewyn Davis ditty atop, recorded in the same approx. early 60s time zone as Britt's Another Earth anecdote WOULD have taken place, you realize there's more going on here than either film quite grasps --there's a very real trepidation about being next in line to be shot into space for both these films, and for Gravity. Britt only wants to go up in space to escape the shame of having killed a kid in a drunk driving accident; Sandra Bullock goes in space to escape the pain of having a daughter killed in a drunk driving accident. Meanwhile I'd spoil the plot to explain whose drunk driving and who or what they hit in Llewyn, but either way, without shame or grief to propel you there seems no real reason to volunteer to be the next monkey shot into space (unless you're besotted by Tyler Durden).

But the Coens can't imagine what else folk singers were for if not to express trepidation about going off to maybe die for their country. And in 1961 folk craze there's still no Vietnam to name Llewyn's generation. Vietnam! The war that made Milwaukee famous, that made Walter crazy with PSD-by-proxy, that gave Dylan's protests songs resonance for a young male populace pinioned by American flag pitchforks at the border between Canada and Cambodia. Without a war to name them the 1961West Village scenesters of Inside Llewyn Davis can only float in the misty white smoke over the dark green corduroy; the color scheme and lighting like what it must feel like walking through an unlit folk museum in the middle of the day while slowly going color blind. Aurally, there's way too much quiet and too much resonance - old Llewyn can hike his guitar all over creation, whip it out and boom it's perfectly tuned and the sound resonates like you're listening to yourself in earphones with a good condenser mic, ne'er does he have to play over clinking cups or drunkards. Like Mad Men before it, and after it, this is a land where you can actually whisper at a bar and be heard from across the table.

But symbolically, it's the best film about elliptical orbits since The Werkmeister Harmonies!

Gravity has orbits too, and since there's nothing to slow you once you start moving, just bumping into someone can send you rolling along in an infinite terrifying somersault, until you're sure you're going to just hyperventilate up your remaining oxygen and die still somersaulting endlessly out into deep space, endlessly endlessly oxygen draining from your panicked huffing --until George Clooney comes to your rescue, time and again, and harrowing near death escapes and space station leap-frogging and immanent metaphysical evaporation come and go but your suits and pods always be pressurized. Sandra Bullock's incredible module hopping routine here has no correlation in any other film except, I think, The Swimmer, but it's just another orbit of cramped coffins--the average American's stations of the cross: bed, car, cubicle, car, couch, bed are interlocked space modules which she swims through in various space suits and in her underwear! But most of all she finds orbits --everything that goes past her is coming back around maybe twice as fast.

Such interlocking elliptical orbits are the Coens stock and trade, as folk musician Llewyn Davis says after "Hang Me Hang Me," the number that opens and closes the film and we have to wonder if it's the same night a, "it was never new and it never gets old." In Gravity, Ryan seeks a space ship or vehicle to escape her orbit, but Davis is the space ship, old and new and never getting old and it's a folk song around and around, just like any musician playing the same song night after night until he needs to suss out new ways to divert himself within it.  He can't escape an orbit he doesn't admit exists, because it would mean acknowledging the ceaseless ticking of Britt Marling's spaceship's funeral clock. He's learned to sing over it.

"there's no success like failure,
and failure's no success at all" - Robert Zimmerman

He'd rather quit than make any artistic compromise that might jeopardize his folk failure; the basement clubs he plays in resemble (no doubt intentionally) medieval dungeons, spotlights coming in from above and the side like stray rays of sunshine down into Poe's pendulum swingin' pit -- and Corman's adaptation made in1961 the year this is all set -- no doubt the Coens are champing at the bit for the days of Roderick Usher, I kept expecting Llewyn to catch a screening. Maintaining that allusion would have been nice, but instead the Coens cram in unlikable anachronisms like the dago red working class owner to rob the folk scene of every last ounce of solidarity, as if the Coens don't know the difference between a coffee house and a strip club.

But the Coens have never been even close to Altmanesque. People rarely talk in their films and certainly don't overlap like, so we must deal with the subject in isolation, ala Kubrick, forcing us to wonder: are they making movies about alienation BECAUSE they hate crowded ensemble cast naturalism, or the other way around. They make Llewyn into Susan Alexander Kane, driven by an inner Orsons seeking the bubble reputation even into the canon of indifference. There is, after all, only one Oscar Levant. So as Don Draper would say, what is the benefit?

But there are oases --the kindness of the bohemian 'Lovahs'-style Columbia professor academics is timeless, so is the existential aura of the Coen Bros-brand Old Testament god-playing which this time around is rather merciful. They are still finding ways to insert quotes and themes from O Brother Where Art Thou's source text, Homer's Odyssey into Sullivan's Travels-style deconstructions of the rich kid reverence for the poor working negro sick and sniffling at three AM dawn or whatever. Homer's gods note that men create for themselves "grief greater than the griefs that fate assigns”-- they also throw their proxy life lines and opportunities so he might throw them each in turn away, such as missing the chance for credit and royalties, cashing in on the cowardly claustrophobia of the above-quoted song for nothing more than a few hundred bucks which he quickly tosses away. For Llewyn, the fear of being stuck up above the planet utterly dependent on a pressurized suit to survive, i.e. famous, is very real because the sun never shines in his current world and he's terrified to find what not being enshrouded by dark clouds might feel like.

Hold on my brother, Paxil is coming!

Moving on -- Bubble Boy (2001) is a round planet onto himself, attracting satellites wherever he bounces. Why is he so much better with people than poor Llewyn? Innocence, man, the naïveté of sheltered bubble child Jimmy Livingston (Jake Gyllenhaal) makes an 'honorable' goal of breaking up an impending marriage between his beloved neighbor Chloe (Marley Shelton) and some sleazy rocker. It's a wish that brings him on his own Candide-like innocent abroad incredible journey -- his pleasant manner and is a rarity to begin with in comedy (it wouldn't be as cool if he was, say, Adam Sandler or Rob Schneider). It works because he's a gorgeous, sweet young fellow --the eyes, Manolo, they never lie. So the bubble is just the shell thrown up by any artistic extrovert who can't quite believe he could ever get a hot girl, regardless of how good he might look to himself in the mirror.

The mirror, Manolo, it a always lie.

In his sweet naïveté, Jimmy is really more like the Justin Timberlake character in Inside Llewyn Davis, the happy alive, gentle, kind fellow, open to the universe's giving because he is giving by nature, so earns the instant karma.Gyllenhaal's charm awe most everyone he meets -- and though sheathed forever--apparently--in his yellow plastic film, he liberates souls wherever he goes, excepting a few, like Zach Galifianakis ticket window, who remains all alone, trapped in his own bubble of a middle-of-nowhere bus terminal.

Deeper-reshing

The cat Ulysses meanwhile is the true astronaut of Davis, because he's a Russian cosmonaut version, he's learned to love the ticking -- haven't all domestic animals, and bubble boys? Without the burden of expectation or experience, every tick is a banquet, every tock a day at the farm.

“A man who has been through bitter experiences and traveled far enjoys even his sufferings after a time” ― Homer, (The Odyssey)

"How his naked ears were tortured
by the sirens sweetly singing" - "Tales of Brave Ulysses" (Creem)

I have some problems with Alfonso Cuarón, as underneath his gift for sci fi lurks idealized reverence for a madre's love for her nina that makes John Ford seem like Sam Fuller. I had some deep fundamental problems with santa-de-madre core of Cuarón's Children of Men. Suicide kits made sense in Soylent Green (see my praise of same here) but if there's no more kids there shouldn't be any more overpopulation, just drunken parties. That patented Cuarón sentimental mierda de caballo comes through in the form of Sandra Bullock's telescope designer's haunted past, which enables her to have a few scenes of big emotional crisis and acceptance. It's tacked on baby, like a poster of Rita Hayworth in reverse.

Salvation deferred (from top): Rita Hayworth (Bicycle Thieves),
Carey Mulligan (Llewyn), Marley Shelton (Bubble Boy)

Bicycle Thieves (AKA 'The Bicycle Thief') is not what most people think it is, where the dad makes so many bad decisions (like not keeping an eye on his bike) his first day putting up Rita Hayworth posters that he snaps at any hand that tries to feed him. I think its use as the gold standard of sentimental pathos-drenched Italian neorealism has cast it unfairly in the minds of those who've never seen it (such as myself up until a few years ago) as a sentimental sob story, the kind of thing enjoyed only by the bourgeois who feel seeing and making movies about poverty is an expression of benevolent social largesse (much of the Coens work seems a warped satire of this largesse -- Llewyn is playing at being depressed and poor - because it's 'in' - if he was really hungry he wouldn't hesitate to follow any suggestions that come his way.

What Bicycle Thieves has in spades is a deadpan analysis of the poor person sense of entitlement, oh woe is me, to the point the dad refuses the gifts and advice offered because it conflicts with his idea of himself as a martyr, for example brushing aside the offered ticket for a free spaghetti dinner only to then spend his last few coins on a far less nice-a meal for him and his son. It makes the rich feel better in a way, perhaps, seeing this poor financial planning as evidence of a will to fail --these peasants can't walk away from their conception of themselves as poor and so throw away their chances at wealth (such as the mother paying her lest centavos on a fortune teller, you know, to see if they ever are going to have any money). The Coens stack the deck Vittorio De Sica fashion, and allow for lots of scenes of scruffy Llewyn hitchiking and trudging across the barren landscapes to Chicago to hit up a hotshot owner of the Cape of Horn, a big dusky club bedecked, like the Lamplight, with posters and memoranda. There's a lot of that memoranda here, a sense that the winsome wand of folk history shall not upon poor Llewyn's shoulder tap, with good reason. He's a oglum tempo pony, destined for the two for a dollar bin underneath the good stuff at Princeton Record Exchange. So there's no emotion, only perfectly modulated voice and guitar, rich with the idea he's impressing his listeners with the ability to fake 'realness.'

Brave Ulysses. aboard spaceship Glum Folkie 

The Coens have always been the Stanley Kubricks of the contemporary lit film, by 'lit film' I mean Carver-esque observational minor key rhythmic detail, dotted with quirky symbolism, all as critical in both illuminating the inner and outer life of the character, and so, us all. Nothing much happens in the film, except alienation and possible redemption, told in moments and observational imagery. Like a character in  James Joyce's Dubliners, Llewyn looks around outside his restrictive bubble nowhereland, but never escapes it, never trusts the oxygen will be there when he takes off his pressurized helmet. That said, he knows how to forgive an enemy with a kind of papal benedictory wave. Adios, Llewyn: Vietnam, rock, and LSD soon will wash your incumbent gloom clear away, the youth and academes will realize the easiest route to outer space is within - one needn't lug one's earth-dependent body along with them to see the universe. Unzip they yellow film shell and step out!

It's the body, in the end, that is the prison: its incessant whining for oxygen, its overreaction to desired stimuli in a self-sabotage loop; all the illusions of permanence it creates-- one magnificent gesture, unzipping the bubble to kiss the Chloe in BB; going over the cliff hand and hand rather than surrendering to the law, sticking your tongue out to receive that holiest of tab communions in HAIR, or throwing caution to the wind to rescue a cat, or even just preparing for your immanent death alone in an airless capsule, surrendering one's corporeality to get that last minute mirage of freedom, that's the one decision that actually makes a difference.

Egoic fear keeps us locked into our breathing patterns on instinct, huffing that oxygen shit down like it's water. Shit will fuck you up, man, get you addicted to the tree of woe like a masochist Conan. Become an oxygen junky and become a coward when death beckons. Why can't we all be like Jake Gideon and just float into the warm body bag embrace of Jessica Lange? Instead we're slaves to our lungs. We're descended via evolution from those who feared death, not the good dying young. We are the spawn of cowards who survived and procreated as a last ditch effort to stave off the reaper, and who reincarnate as soon as they can to try it again and again. Our genes themselves are afraid of floating in that clear black ether, you know, like a MAN would -- rejoining into the seamless endless lotus blossoming of the crown chakra like a cliff diver.

As I write this a rerun of SNL is playing on the TV behind me, it's Cee-Lo singing "Forget You." And suddenly the inescapable loop of karma clicks back in place like the revolution of the planet finally caught itself up back on the tape loop; any musician lucky enough to have a big hit (such as Cee-Lo's) is compelled then for the rest of his life to play that same song, the same way, stuck in amber, frozen in time to the one breakthrough moment, to let its original potency be distilled, pasteurized, for mass consumption. Let's Spend Some Time Together Now!

From there it's all downhill, to the eventual burying and VH1 resurrection. This is the brilliance of the digital tape. Even now we should be able to find Llewyn Davis' entire early 60s output with a few key words entered into Spotify, if he existed. We can recapture the feeling of those coffee houses through the countless live-in-the-West-Village recordings of the era, all remastered onto digital, a time when people could smoke indoors, were trusted to make their own decisions. But in doing so we see that Llewyn's world, where everyone waits in hushed reverence for him to finish his mundane songs, is strictly inside his own bubble, a prison of a thousand dimensions, one that paralyzes even Sandra Bullock's astronaut in a holding pattern rotation.

Reflections of / the way life used us.

Astronaut Ryan (Bullock) has more of the karmic awakening than either Llewyn or BB because Davis' latent empathy leaves him still a ways to go, and BB has his true love energy which is almost like cheating. Anyone can be brave when they're in love. But Ryan's journey actually reminded me a lot of the last few times I did serious meditation. For one thing, in order to really touch the holy white light of spiritual awakening there's a terrifying valley of lonesome shadow you have to pass through, 'the long dark night of the soul' - an initiation of sorts, to allow, with love, your entire egoic self construct to be ripped from you, shredded up, in the mandibles of clockwork reptile guardians. It is terrifying. It took me several attempts, but I got on the clockwork page - because when you transcend space and time at last everything seems clockwork like, interlocked turning wheels, because the idea of stasis is revealed as the illusion -- you are not hallucinating when you feel these reptilian guardian mandibles clicking their sprockets, running your soul through their teeth like film through a projector -- you WERE hallucinating when you didn't see or feel that. Now that you're awake you can feel the earth turning below you, as it really is doing; you're on a giant surfboard rock, hanging on by the treads of your feet as it spins in a slow motion tailspin rolling madly around the sun by an axis that always seems about to tilt the wrong way. The fear is so intense you actually have to go through the Kubler-Ross five stages of grief, to get to the white light

pulsing amniotic godhead, the orb, the giant egg of vibrational energy that is the sum total of all that is and has been and will be.

If you could look behind and ahead at the same time, you'd see that where you floated from is where you going to; it's not travel as we understand it in a 3-D space time context. You're on a different orbit now, a shorter one, the next track in on the holy mandala spinning LP wheel of life. That's all there is to it, you wind up right where you started. The track was always there, right next to the previous one, it's not like you ever changed albums, you just got conned into believing the first track was all there was. It's not like we die and go somewhere and come back, it's all the same life, because all this time you've just been sitting there in a lotus position, on a mattress or chair in your room, breathing and humming and that's all; you're just a vibration, a wave matrix. Chant long enough, resonate deep enough and you can untangle yourself completely back into the infinite AUM. The ultimate journey for Sandra Bullock's frightened astronaut is ultimately this. It doesn't involve having to be nice to external people; even George Clooney's fellow astronaut eventually seems to morph into the fabric of her psyche, animus as final gatekeeper to the divine; Bullock's real journey is the spiritual one, out in space no one can hear you whine, panic, argue, bargain, hyperventilate, or cast blame. There's no higher mom to cry to; the great thing about Bullock's master class performance here is that her gradual five stages process is so palpable we can almost feel the moments she begins to let go not just of her attachment to life but to her morbid attachment to death as well.

“History ... is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake.” ― James Joyce, (Ulysses)

There's only two beings who really wake up from history in this strange world, those in love or on drugs, and meditation-doers-tryers -- or even better, all three at once. Such a trio is a great armor -- Jimmy in Bubble Boy, a weird holy power is given as the ego's fear response is short circuited and it dissolves in a rush of pleasure and obsession and giddiness and loss of appetite that transcends all the concrete skies and yellow depressive bubbles that separate our senses from the fullness of the world. As the Coens seem more concerned with torturing their heroes it's up to us to instill the hope, to reach into the screen with our compassion in ways we don't have to with the holy Cuarón, or in the bouncing Bubble Boy. The difference is all within, baby --it's your perceptions alone... or in the words of Eliot:

"We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison" 

The goal isn't to just not think of a key (almost impossible if you're told not to), but for us to stop thinking of ourselves as separate from the prison walls, the warden, the bars, the cot. You can still be yourself, but you are also your neighbor. You are also the world. Buenos Aires. is your right foot. Your urine stream is as Niagara Falls. Why not? That is letting go... that is what we mean, the obliteration of the phony separations... this is true peace.

So think not of the key and the thousand dimension prison dissolves behind you like a dizzy snore you have to take on your girlfriend's word is something you should see a doctor for; the astronaut comic books must be lifted from their protective mylar prisons and read... whether you rise or not when you pick your sandbag feet off the floor, matters little: the comic book will lose its pristine mint status but the helmet must come off, the fresh air must be breathed. It's as inevitable as falling.

And we will fall.

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Abilene Point is Anywhere: How Texas Conquered Death - SOUTHLAND TALES (2006)

As part of the Richard Kelly blogathon on Exodus 8.2 I'm revising and re-posting my initial fractured skewed take on SOUTHLAND TALES which is heavily influenced by Steven Shaviro's highly recommended book, Post Cinematic Affect

"It is the business of the future to be dangerous." 

----Alfred N. Whitehead (1925)

"Scientists are saying the future is going to be far more 

futuristic than they originally predicted."

--- Krista Now (Sara Michell Gellar), Southland Tales

"Can you prove it didn't happen?" 

-- Criswell, Plan 9 From Outer Space

After the cult explosion around Kelly's big debut, DONNIE DARKO, it was inevitable his follow-up would be needlessly obtuse. With a bit of post-modern affect discussion under your belt, or on a double feature with BOARDING GATE however, it might tighten up. Might not. There is an annoying buzz of self-indulgent confidence at work in the film which you'd never find in the much more serious Assayas. He would never share the naivete that since one film of his is a cult item, the next one will be too, and in presuming its weirdness will find a cult it's right there with BUCKAROO BANZAI as far as 'another think coming'. With its ceaseless frisson and funky breaks meant to dazzle fans of a certain age but it's a film made up of dead hypertext links and little text. At least BUCKAROO had Peter Weller's taciturn deadpan perfection to carry it along. The closest SOUTHLAND gets is The Rock, and though he makes some brave choices (Bob Hope-style faux cowardice), Rock's no Weller. Can you imagine the Rock as Bill Burroughs?

Kelly's presumption that we'll watch SOUTHLAND over and over and compare obscure references and symbolic meaning on the internet comes from an understandable-for-the-young miasma about changing viewing habits and--interestingly enough since Assayas is French but not Kelly and only Europeans (and South Americans) love their auteurs unconditionally--that newer generations of internet kids will think he's cutting edge if he just explores their virtual worlds. But the Darko days movie watching was limited to cable and DVD and midnight screenings. There were no youtubes and Netflixes the type of things that make just watching one film one time a daunting improbability for newer generations. When BUCKAROO came out we didn't think it was great but we still taped it off cable and watched it 100 times, because it wasn't bad. Do you want to know why DONNIE DARKO was such a hit, and screened at midnight showings for years in my old East Village neighborhood? Because chicks loved the doomed, moody romance and Jake G's stoner stare; his battles with schizophrenia mirrored their own issues with existential expressions like cutting, anorexia, drugs, and (at least based on the girls I knew, at the time), grudge sex. It was a hand into their darkness, a friend who knew the score and who had great eyelashes. And it was lyrical and poetic without being close to corny; it was there for you. And since girls went, guys went right after them. You could go to the midnight show in your pajamas and no one would bat an eye, or a ball, very far. In other words, it was a date movie for the midnight hipster set. They could go after hooking up, meet back  up with their friends, and then not have to see each other on the way out.

"Quantum teleportation, teen horniness, and war."

SOUTHLAND has nothing much for the all-night girls to make it worth escapades out on their G trains, except maybe the Darko-ish sex appeal of Justin Timberlake as Boxer, the lone gunner at the pier at the end of time, but he's just one (or rather two) of a big, overstuffed and seemingly under-directed cast, and while I admire the abstract crossword puzzle association to films like A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (plastic oranges are to SOUTHLAND what the watermelon was to BUCKAROO), MADAME SATAN (a crazy Zeppelin party), THE BIG LIEBOWSKI (dancers in jazz age make-up out on the skee-ball lanes), and MULHOLLAND DR. (Rebekah "Llorando" Del Rio singing the national anthem over John Cale strings), it doesn't add up to even the sum of its parts. Don't get me wrong - I love Moby's score, and I love that everyone is working to stop the apocalypse in only in the most perfunctory of ways, but I'm a dude... who's seen a lot of dude films, over and over, that girls may not like since they ain't got no romance, or angst. My girl can't look at SOUTHLAND for more than a handful of minutes without getting restless and yet she name-drops Sparkle Motion at every party she goes to. I even gave her their T-shirt.

DARKO was about the apocalypse immolation of the individual but SOUTHLAND presumes there is no individual to sacrifice, no time left to travel anywhere but across a single moment. DARKO was elliptical but had momentum. SOUTHLAND has only the stasis of 2-D checkerboard movement, like the way time slows and matter mirror shatters close to the black hole of ground and time zero which is fine for me, but boys are more pro-apocalypse than girls, which is another reason this film didn't connect with them. The nonstop parade of documentaries about 2012, Nostradamus, and the Ice Age on Discovery and the History Channel proves what Kelly's SOUTHLAND TALES hints at: some of us, self included, are excited for the apocalypse. It's a chance to stop receiving paper bank statements in a whole new way. I'd even argue that we're apocalypse-dependent, some of us. Without the fantasy of a global reset button, we'd be stuck with the guilt, hangover, and debt of seven generations. Aren't you always tempted to just blow up the house rather than have to clean up your messes or look that crying Indian in his eye?

In the new century, if we heard the world was gonna end 'exactly' five hundred years from now, would we care? The game of it all becomes what the Buddha calls "joyful participation in the sorrows of the world. When the world finally adapts that marvelous strategy, owning up to amnesia is the same as pressing the button because even Def-Con 5 needs love.

Even the bad guys who monitor everything from afar in SOUTHLAND are secretly enthralled by the notion of the end, and are all rebelling from one program or another to ensure that end arrives. Good guys and bad all want the same thing in an age when amnesia is inducible via an easily acquired drug. Anyone can be abducted and turned loose without being able to identify one's abductees. The Rock (Boxer Santeros), starts the film with amnesia and the first thing his wife (Mandy Moore) notes when seeing him--as if it was the reek of stale booze and cigarettes or stale perfume on his collar-is that he'd been kidnapped and mind-erased. He denies his amnesia on instinct as if its something to be ashamed of. It's a weird choice, but if you've ever come home from a party with a mind full of weird drugs you promised your ball-and-chain you wouldn't do, and can barely remember doing, then you'll know the feeling.

What Kelly also understands is the nature of drugs and the weird habit alcoholics and drug addicts have of watching the same movie over and over again because... I forget why. They're too wasted to change the channel? Or dredge up another DVD? Or for that matter, the endless repeat seasons of reality TV shows, where our knowledge of what is going to happen, who will win, who will die, is granted us like benign rulers, or our own inner Pilot Abilenes. Revelation 6.8 and behold a pale horse and the name that sat on it was repeat business; if you've ever edited footage on Final Cut until it loses all meaning... or if you've ever conducted experiments on soldiers or sniffed paint fumes from a spray can, or had amnesia, then you know what I mean, and if you're happy and you know it, hit the squib, and act shocked when you die. Snivel as you swivel your electric high chair, so the Dead End Kids won't want to start no trouble in the rubble. Just leave them a DVD of SOUTHLAND TALES, and they'll think you were one muthufuggin' lost-ass generation. Weren't you, Perfect Tommy?

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The Rosebud Principle

 

"Maybe it was something he lost"

Gawker founder Nick Denton recently learned the Zuckerbergian teachings of THE SOCIAL NETWORK the hard way: don't go changing formats in midstream, i.e. you can't expect people to endure slow confusing menus on their lunch break. Denton's recently lost tons of readers in a bid to redesign Gawker for the future. Redesigning is never smart until you have a billion friends, which is why Mark Zuckerberg is so uptight about the server being down even for a day in David Fincher's movie. You can't have doubt, or distraction or difficulty - the competition is too great. Was it self-sabotage, a fear of getting too big too fast that sent Denton on the wrong trail? And if one is, like Zuckerberg, free of such self-doubt, is it because of confidence, or just that the self-doubt already has a home, in bad relationships?

NETWORK's semi-fictionalized (?) Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) is not as pompous--yet--as Charles Foster Kane in decreeing people will think "what I tell them to think!" and he's smart enough to never go down with the ship, because he sells everybody else out first. Yet in the Big Jim Gettes segment of CITIZEN KANE (the only movie SOCIAL NETWORK, other than THERE WILL BE BLOOD, TSN can really be compared with), Welles' clueless billionaire lets go of his common sense and decides to not bow out of New York's gubernatorial race, even if means exposing his love nest with "singer." Zuckerberg knows far more about the death knell of bad press than Welles, but of course now the press itself is far different: instead of yellow journalism smear campaigns between rival papers, scandal can be brought out by even the most drunk and marginalized of nerds.  

But I mention Rosebud because of the overarching theme of Fincher's film, which begins with Zuckerberg on a date with Erica (Rooney Mara, shortly to be seen as Lisabeth S. in the DRAGON TATTOO remake) and hints Facebook was the result of a drunken bit of coder geek vengeance against her after she broke up with him just because he was more concerned about getting into snooty Harvard clubs than he was about her and her stupid issues. Once all Mark's problems are solved, and he's got 24 bazillion dollars, he remembers he invented Facebook just to stalk her, and lives obsessively ever after. If Kane had been around in the age of Facebook, maybe there wouldn't have been so much confusion over who or what Rosebud was: he'd have a picture of it in his albums! He'd have a sledding game on there, and a 'design your own vintage sled' app. The ornate picnics and famous guest-collecting could be canceled, because he wouldn't need to see his friends to prove they existed. He could make Xanadu online via one of those online worlds with the Sims.

In short, for all his fancy talk, Kane failed to crush the social sphere down to a small enough crumpled ball that he could find his obscure object of desire, that Rosebud. Zuckerberg on the other hand destroys the last vestiges of the gasping public sphere, and lives in eternal orbit around his beloved lost sled/girl because, in the process of amassing his fortune, he dissolved the meaning of wealth. The need to flaunt has been replaced by the need to haunt. Mansions mean nothing if all you need is a wireless connection to keep your million friends always in reach.

In each case (Rosebud, Erica) we're caught in the same dramaturgical principle - the 'suspension of functional maturity.' The subject 'freezes' in time when the opportunity arises to escape the confines of his current life - and it resumes when he's climbed so far up there's no one in sight to conquer. As a boy Kane dropped his sled when it was time to go to New York and learn to manage his inherited fortune. He remembers it only later, but "singer" Susan Foster comes into his line of flight right as he's about to go uncrate it. Finally preparing to project his objet petit a, Kane's receptivity finds an accidental screen in Susan. His purpose changes from resuming his childhood progress to trying to enforce the success of an unwilling opera star on an unwilling public. When his whole life crumbles to shit and he's on his death bed, only then he finally remembers the sled. It's as if the 'story' of the rope ladder to success at the price of your soul hinges on this surrender of linear personal evolution. THE SOCIAL NETWORK is similarly constructed as the long personal grudge/obsession of a genius computer nerd over a girl who forces him to confront his own immaturity.

As David Fincher is so able a candidate for the role of '21st century Welles' let's examine the nature of genius auteurs in depicting genius millionaires, with the fact borne in mind that movies are an intensely expensive endeavor. Even the smallest indie picture can cost millions and one can only assume that there's more skulduggery involved getting a film made than we will ever know. Compare for example Welles'--perhaps unconscious but nonetheless inexcusable--sabotaging of RKO via his boondoggling in Brazil in 1942 whilst attempting to edit both JOURNEY INTO FEAR and THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS via long distance phone calls and telegrams while he slept with local models, waxed poetically over the suffering poor, and danced through Carnivale. (1) Compare that kind of infantile entitlement to Zuckerberg's in SOCIAL NETWORK and all the dots suddenly connect. You don't make a billion friends without making a few enemies, and sometimes a billion friends are your own worst enemy.

Welles in Rio with his million friends

Mark Z, anywhere, with his millions friends

The ultimate tragedy in both AMBERSONS and FEAR is they could have been great, if Welles had been there to see them through the studio machine to distribution. He wasn't, and ran so far over budget in Brazil he basically bankrupted the studio, then got sore when they re-edited and trimmed AMBERSONS without his consent. The nerve! Fincher seems more reliable, but don't forget ALIEN 3, which wasted money and talent and sucked. And frankly, I don't like SEVEN, which seems the most claustrophobic and misanthropic of the post-SILENCE OF THE LAMBS genius serial killer movies deluge, and features one of Brad Pitt's most annoying performances, yeah?

Fincher digs coding

But all is forgiven with FIGHT CLUB, which almost started a revolution in the theater on E. 86th Street where I saw it, and of course ZODIAC. I still can't listen to any Donovan, let alone "Hurdy Gurdy Man" without getting nightmares. And yet, it's telling that there exists a sense of which came first, Fincher's inability to create human warmth onscreen, or his themes of alienation and the collapse of the social sphere? Like many emotionally-challenged auteurs, Fincher finds warmth at the office -- the autumnal 70s mod beauty of the newspaper bullpen in ZODIAC; the chummy office spaces of Facebook, but overall his worlds are dark and cold and always on the  brink of savagery. THE SOCIAL NETWORK then, is perfectly suited to his talents, or is it the other way around?

The world is my bedroom, I shall not log.

The night Zuckerberg creates the first FB prototype-- a 'who's hot / not" program-- Fincher cuts back and forth between him in his dorm and a sterile yet self-consciously 'decadent' exclusive Harvard club party, with bimbos bussed in from all around, for what is basically a long night of strippers and douchebag boys in club ties and backwards white baseball caps. Perhaps it's because my experiences on these lines were clouded in cigarette and pot smoke, full of drunk shouting and noisy bands, but this exclusive party seemed tragically sad and hollow but it's truly unusual in film and it sets the tone for all subsequent SOCIAL gatherings. The women are all drug-addled groupies or wise, centered ladies who look down at the less together mortals--and the boys are either the aforementioned douchebags or rich nerds hiding behind CRTS, funnels, shots, and six-foot Graphix bongs. No one is 'connecting' --even superstar Napster-creatin' Justin Timberlake is just boastin' and toastin' in a void where he knows everyone's name but only to show off his memory. A Jewish fraternity's Caribbean night party, for example, is dead in the water since there 'could' be a better party elsewhere. No one can enjoy a party if a better one might be going on somewhere, and by the laws of Groucho Marx, the best party is the one they're not invited to. During the day, lectures and classes are merely backdrops for late arrivals, note passing, and early, dramatic departures. In a way this version of Harvard represents the beginning of the end of the social sphere even before the arrival of Facebook. But again which came first? The nanny state censoring nearly all our public acts (sexual harassment, smoking, basically everything done by Don Draper in MAD MEN) or the rise of online communities?

Jack Daniels makes a brilliant 1.75 cameo

And is Fincher a misogynist or is the SN mise-en-scene meant to conjure misogyny, and gender stratification? By the end of THE SOCIAL NETWORK, Zuckerberg is blissfully alone, to stalk... and stalk... without getting rained on, or noticed, or paying for his crimes. The only ones who suffer in this new deal are the women who would prefer their men not hide, sneer, or shout obscenities from the safety of their limousine windows. But as Tricky said, it's cool, that's what money's for. It's to make tall waitresses with attitude smile at you, getting that 20% tip that's big enough for your own private jet ski all by itself.

I remember I used to suffer from great social anxiety before the arrival of Friendster. What helped me were my precious testimonials: "Erich is so cool" etc. I had like 300 testies! Being able to read that list of validations any time, like at 4 AM after a bad date, reminded me I had friends who liked me -- it was instant and it worked! My need to socialize in real time dropped off by half. By the time I'd migrated to Myspace and Livejournal I was depressed again (neither had testimonials) but I now had my insatiable urge fulfilled and my socializing dropped off to nothing. Now, on iMeds, and Facebook, and not being allowed to smoke in bars or restaurants, I never go anywhere. Bars look weird with all that clear air. Now you can see the sad drunk all the way in the back of the room. And he's on his laptop, and the cute girl has her iPhone at the ready, repelling any and all would be hitter-onners with the inarguable pre-emptive presence of THE SOCIAL NETWORK.  Might as well stay home then, and hide, and wait for the collapse to complete, or until girls who aren't coke-addicted groupies finally find a way to see keyboard clacking as something sexy, maybe via the flesh of the crushed black centipede?

One thing's for sure, the gap between the 'real' of physical nuts-and-bolts-and-eye-contact reality and the safe anonymity of the web is widening to the point not even a javelin will get you across it. A Rosebud by any other name would smell as sweet, until one finally uncrated it. The real sled smells of musty, warped wood, traces of snow having long since gone to glowing liquid rust along the blades, the oxidation tempered by the crate's suffocating darkness. Better to keep it crated, then, forever, and just dream of it--all perfectly, preciously sad and abandoned--while you race down white sloping hills on that online winter sports game, pressing 'play again' over and over... until suddenly it's morning and there's no one left online to crack your dingy snow globe balls.

1) See Simon Callow's Orson Welles Volumer 2: Hello Americans

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